One way to look at the relationship between SEO and Content Marketing is the perspective of SEO making requests of content marketing (although their synergy isn’t as aggressive as it sounds).

Let’s look at the three essential ingredients SEO requires – keywords, backlinks, and a technical site audit – and how SEO and content work together to help you achieve your digital marketing goals.

1. KEYWORDS CAN HELP YOU GENERATE CONTENT IDEAS FOR SEO AND CONTENT MARKETING.

There is no such thing as SEO without keywords, and the most astute content marketers understand that the best content helps your rank for the terms that are most related to what your consumers are already searching for – which is why every effective content strategy starts with keyword research.

A comprehensive keyword research session starts with some simple brainstorming. Think about the main goals of your site and jot down some keywords. From there, expand this list with the help of keyword tools.

Below are two ways you can identify keywords beyond those you currently rank for:

Paid tools like SEMrush: Another option is to look at potential keywords through the lens of how competitive the term is via SEMrush. On the platform’s main dashboard, they have a section that offers related keywords, which is another great resource to identify terms that your site might not already rank for (see below).

Once you’ve got a set list of keywords, think about how you can use them effectively beyond just technical means, and beyond meta descriptions and title tags. Here are a few other ways you can use your keyword research:

Blog posts: Use your list of keywords to help you come up with new blog topics. Referring back to the cheeseburger example, you can produce a blog post where you sample multiple burgers from fast food chains.

Static and dynamic assets: Keywords can be a jumping off point for more creative projects. In the case of “best cheeseburger toppings,” you could create an interactive asset that lets users build their own burgers.